How Zach Collins makes the most of his minutes for top seed Gonzaga

Przemek Karnowski walks off the court when Zach Collins walks on, one 7-footer subbing in for the other. In the last 10 games, they’ve been on the court together for average of four minutes, 33 seconds per game. Against the three non-conference opponents who join West Region No. 1 seed Gonzaga in the NCAA tournament field, they never were on the court at the same time.

“When PK comes off the floor, he is hot, and when Zach comes off the floor he’s hot,” said Mike Collins, Zach’s father.

“PK deserves to go out the way he wants; he’s a senior and he’s earned it. It just doesn’t make it easy on Zach’s side. But it’s kind of a symbiotic relationship.”

It’s symbiotic because Gonzaga benefits from both. How the Bulldogs figured out how to manage minutes is one of the reasons they are 32-1 and Mark Few was named Coach of the Year by USA TODAY Sports.

Karnowski rebounded from a back injury that threatened his career and cost him most of his junior season to earn all-West Coast Conference honors for the second time.

Collins, a freshman, averages 17.1 minutes per game and doesn’t have a start on his stat sheet. But the numbers you do find there are remarkable.

Collins’ offensive rating on kenpom.com, a measure of individual offensive efficiency, ranks fifth among all Division I players who have been used on at least 24% of their team’s possessions. The Nox. 1, 2 4 and 6 players ranked on that list — SMU’s Semi Ojeleye, Gonzaga’s Nigel Williams-Goss, Kansas’ Frank Mason and Villanova’s Josh Hart — were their conference’s player of the year and the third – Wake Forest’s John Collins – was his conference’s runner-up for the award. Three are USA TODAY Sports all-Americans.

Collins’ offensive rebounding percentage of 12.0 ranks 98th in Division I and his defensive rebounding percentage of 23.3 ranks 81st. His block percentage of 8.69 ranks 38th. He was the WCC’s most accurate shooter, and his 65.5% effective field goal percentage — a metric that reflects the added value of three-point field goals — would rank 13th in Division I if his minutes were enough to qualify.

“He’s killing it for the minutes he’s getting,” said Donny Daniels, a Bulldogs assistant coach who works with the team’s big men. “It’s all about the efficiency. Regardless of when he comes in, efficiency’s efficiency.”

Fellow assistant Brian Michaelson recruited Collins out of Las Vegas’ Bishop Gorman High School, talking to him at least once a day during Collins’ junior and senior years, by Mike Collins’ estimation. Michaelson said he was drawn to Zach Collins’ IQ, his soft hands, his three-point shooting range, his knack for drawing fouls and his growing skill as a rim protector. Plus, he watched Collins grow to 6-8 as a high school sophomore, 6-11 as a junior and 7-0 as a senior.

“The role that he’s played and the importance to this team I don’t think can really be put into perspective, Michaelson said.

“Each night’s different in terms of what we need and what that role is, and it’s just about kind of maximizing what makes us successful, and right now that’s just the way it’s broken. But if there’s foul trouble or something happened on any given night, there’s no doubt that he could contribute meaningfully for 30 or 35 minutes a game. There’s no doubt at all that we could roll him out there with any team in the country and he’d be incredibly successful.”

Sharing frontcourt minutes is not new for Collins. At Bishop Gorman, now-Duke sophomore Chase Jeter and Stephen Zimmerman of the Orlando Magic preceded him by one season. They took lead roles in games even though Collins held his own with them in practice. Once they graduated, Collins knew he had one season to prove himself to the public.

“All I heard that whole summer after my junior year was ‘We don’t have Zim. We don’t have Chase. We’re not going to win,’ ” Collins says. “So that kind of ticked me off a little bit, and it really motivated me to work harder.”

He worked hard enough to be named a McDonald’s All-American by the end of his senior season and became the first McDonald’s honoree to enroll at Gonzaga directly from high school. Once he arrived here last summer, he was in class in the during the day and in the gym until 10 each night, often working with team managers on his rim protecting or with the Bulldogs’ guards on the pick and roll.

Collins says he has improved after adjusting the speed and physicality of college basketball, but he remains critical of himself. Daniels, too, says Collins is tougher on himself than anyone else is. Sometimes Collins realizes he’s being too hard on himself when time has passed and he and Daniels do a film review to focus on the good plays, not just the frustrating ones.

Other times it’s more immediate. “If I come out and I’m not doing good, I’m just so angry at myself and I know I could have done better,” Collins says. “And then I say, ‘Relax. You’re going to go in again and you can make up for it.’ On the bench it’s a good time to calibrate your thoughts and see what you messed up on and go out and do it better.

“I’ve gotten a lot more patient in knowing that everything’s a process, everything’s going to take time.”

Yet Collins is also in a small subset of college basketball players who have the chance to go to the NBA after one college season. His diversity of skills stretched over his 7-foot frame make him in the eyes of some talent evaluators a top-20 prospect for the 2017 NBA draft. Could Gonzaga’s first direct-from-high-school McDonald’s All-American also become its first one-and-done player?

“The reality here is if he so chooses to go back, he’s going to do it because he thinks it’s the best thing for him,” Mike Collins says. “But if he decides to go to the NBA, don’t look back and give it everything you have in your body and your head.”

Collins feels a sense of loyalty to Gonzaga for the way they identified and stuck with him before other schools did, and he loves the way they develop and deploy their big men, and that he can talk to the coaching staff about anything.

If he returns to Gonzaga for his sophomore season, he’ll be in the position to get as many minutes as he could wish for, at least 50% more per night, even with promising classmates 6-10 Killian Tillie and 6-11 Jacob Larsen joining him up front. And whether he enters the NBA draft this year as a 19-year-old, he will fit into the talent pool from a developmental standpoint. In 2016, 65% of NBA draft picks were 19 or 20 years old on draft night.

“He’s going to have a big decision to make after the season,” Daniels says, “but whatever he decides, you wish him well. Because he’s got options.”